Then Cardinal Mendoza, the militant head of theChurchi in Spain, rode into the city of Granada at the head of the

Spanish troops- That was in the year 1492. The Spaniards were again the masters of their country and the heirs of one of the greatest civilizations earth has ever known. And yet, as Joseph McCabe points out in his excellent study, “The Splendor of Moorish Spain”: “In another hundred years the population of Spain, which had risen to thirty millions under the Arabs, sank to six millions or seven mil- lions of the poorest, the most ignorant, and almost the most disdained in Christendom.”

How did that dreadful tragedy come about? Let us see.

Among those who had wrought greatly to create the glorybf Spain, while prospering themselves, were the Jews. In agriculture, industry, and business, and in philosophy, in science, in poetry, in medicine, in surgery, in the arts, in_governmental spheres, the Jews had been leaders for

centuries, and to them Spain largely owed her physical and

intellectual wealth. . But now, under the influence of Torquemada, the grim

monk who later figured so tragically for mankind in the

Inquisition, and the priest, Ximenes, who later became the great -Cardinal Ximenes, Queen Isabella was induced to issue a decree calling upon the Jews to become members of the Catholic Church or to leave the country. Some of the Jews became converted, or pretended to be converted, to Catholicism. Upon those who did not even pretend to

become Roman Catholic the Inquisition fell with its tragic

horror. Aged rabbis, wealthy business men, lovely matrons and charming maidens mounted the savage scaffolds to be burnt‘ alive. Some there were who preferred the loss of all their goods and exile to renouncing their religion and remaining in their home land. One hundred and sixty thousand or so of these left Spain and scattered themselves over Europe and Africa. The rumor went abroad that these people who were not allowed to take with them either silver or gold, had swallowed gold; and the result was that many of them were ripped open by pious Spaniards to see whether or not they had actually swallowed gold*. So much for the Jews, whose destruction in and banishment from Spain dealt the country a disastrous blow.

*Note: “A rumor having got abroad that the fugitives were in the habit iof swallowing jewels and gold pieces in order to evade the royal decree-, thousands of unhappy beings were ripped up by the greedy knife of the enemy on land and

sea on the chance of descovering in their mutilated remains some little store of treasure.”————“Spain and Her Colonies,” by Archibald Wilberforce, p. 107.

“In Africa, it is said, the men had their bellies ripped open to see if it were

true that they had swallowed their g'old._”-——“Tl1e Splendour of Moorish Spain,”

by Joseph McCabe, p. 287. 6